Buddhist monks from the Dhammakaya temple walk past a building inside the temple in Pathum Thani province, Thailand, on 9 March 2017. (Photo: Reuters)

MANDALAY — Thousands of Buddhist monks gathered in Burma’s second largest city on Sunday for an event partly organised by a scandal-hit Thai temple whose abbot is wanted for questioning on money-laundering allegations.

The Dhammakaya temple’s foundation helped organise the mass alms-giving for an estimated 20,000 monks on the runway of an abandoned airport in central Mandalay.

Thailand’s largest and wealthiest temple, Dhammakaya has staged similar spectacles at its vast complex north of Bangkok, which police besieged last year in a fruitless search for its fugitive abbot.

The Mandalay event aimed to “tighten the relationship between both Burma and Thailand [and] unite the Theravada monkhood” in the region, according to a Dhammakaya Foundation press release.

In Mandalay, a centre for Buddhist learning crowded with temples and monasteries, monks in burgundy or orange began filing barefoot into the old airport before dawn.

Almost all the monks at the ceremony were from Burma and there were also thousands of local lay people attending along with about 100 monks and other Buddhists from Thailand and Sri Lanka, according to the Dhammakaya temple.

Mandalay is home to the monk Wirathu, the self-styled “Buddhist bin Laden” famous for his anti-Islamic sermons, but there was no sign that he attended the mass alms-giving.

“It’s such a wonderful ceremony. I live in Mandalay, and it’s never happened like this before,” said Ven Ya Ma, 40, who led a group of about 30 monks from the city’s Ma Soe Yein Monastery.

Ven Ya Ma opposed the actions of the Thai police against the Dhammakaya temple, which he said was only promoting Buddhism worldwide.

“People are worried that Buddhism is in danger,” he said.

In March, Thai police abandoned a three-week siege of the Dhammakaya temple complex, which is nearly 10 times the area of the Vatican City and centres around a giant, UFO-shaped golden stupa.